Allan Mcconnell
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 4128409 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Allan Mcconnell |
| PRENOMES | Allan |
| SOBRENOME | Mcconnell |
| ASSINATURA | MCCONNELL A |
| AFILIAÇÕES | The University of Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0755-9291 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 53 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 1283 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 52 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1990 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 17 |
Joannah Luetjens, Reforms that Stick
Governing the Pandemic
This open access book offers unique insights into how governments and governing systems, particularly in advanced economies, have responded to the immense challenges of managing the coronavirus pandemic and the ensuing disease COVID-19. Written by three eminent scholars in the field of the politics and policy of crisis management, it offers a unique ‘bird’s eye’ view of the immense logistical and political challenges of addressing a worst-case sc…
Dramaturgy and crisis management
Dramaturgical perspectives have been used successfully in the past by crisis management researchers. However, previous contributions have been limited because they have been actor‐centered, which has meant that they have tended to ignore the critical role that an audience can play in the drama of a crisis. This article therefore presents a “third act” in which dramaturgical perspectives are used to deliver an actor‐and‐audience centered analysis …
Rethinking disproportionate policy making by introducing proportionate politics
Two routes to precarious success
Australia and New Zealand are routinely presented as sharing more in common than the federal and unitary systems separating them. As two modernising Antipodean settler societies, their governing trajectories have embraced waves of public administration/management reform. Shared pathways seem matched by their relative, although precarious and fragile, early successes in the crisis challenges of COVID-19. This article contextualises and examines on…
Understanding policy responses to Covid-19
Responses to COVID-19 across the globe are immensely varied and often perplexing. Policy levers, from mask wearing and social distancing to lockdowns and school closures, have been adopted and avoided with equal conviction by decisions makers who believe their measures are appropriate. In some contexts, the global pandemic has been treated with due seriousness by governments and political leaders while in others it has been downplayed to such an …
Governing the Pandemic
Covid-19 and the policy sciences
Policy success for whom? A framework for analysis
Explanations for the Brexit policy fiasco
The inability of the Conservative Government led by Prime Minister Theresa May to deliver a Brexit deal by 29 March 2019 was a policy fiasco, condemned widely by Remainers and Leavers alike. The entire process was a unique combination of chaos, day-by-day unravelling of new proposals and gridlock. This article examines three main explanations for the fiasco that are prevalent in contemporary political discourse. Analysis is underpinned by concept…
The use of placebo policies to escape from policy traps
This article provides a roadmap to help analysts approach the under-researched phenomena of policy-making driven to some extent by an attempt to show that governments and broader governing systems have a policy in place to manage tough policy issues, rather than addressing deeper causal factors of the problem. The metaphor of placebo policies is used to explore these issues, supported by a novel secondary metaphor of a 'policy trap' (expectations…
Inaction and public policy
In recent decades, the policy sciences have struggled to come to terms with the significance of inaction in public policy. Inaction refers to instances when policymakers ‘do nothing’ about societal issues. This article aims to put the study of inaction on a new footing. It presents a five-part typology of forms of inaction before focusing on detail on core drivers of inaction found at four policy-making loci: individuals (coping behaviour), publi…
Hidden agendas
Allegations of hidden policy agendas are a perennial feature of public policy-making, but there are no works in existence dealing directly and systematically with this crucial phenomenon. This article seeks to address this gap with a novel heuristic allowing analysts to approach the topic of hidden agendas. It addresses issues of methodology: Who hides? What is hidden? Who do they hide it from? Tools/techniques used to hide. Consequences of hidde…
Bringing lessons from crisis management into the realm of wicked problems
Despite long-term research agendas around how to better understand and address wicked problems, they remain 'wicked' while crises generally come to an end. The objective of this paper is to assess whether governments seeking to address wicked problems can learn lessons from the insights of crisis management. While we are careful to avoid stretching the lessons of crisis management too far, we argue that there is untapped potential in establishing…
Rethinking wicked problems as political problems and policy problems
Study of the 'politics' of wicked problems has tended to be ad hoc, scattered across multiple disciplines. This article seeks to address this gap in our understanding. As well as the traditional policy challenges of wicked issues, elites also have to consider the impact on political reputations, control of agendas and the promotion of particular ideological/governance trajectories. In this context, and focusing on wicked issues as presenting both…
Moving Policy Theory Forward
The stages/policy cycle, multiple streams, and Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) approaches to understanding policy processes, all have analytical value although also attracting substantive criticism. An obvious direction for research is to determine whether the multiple streams framework and the ACF can be refined and applied to other dimensions of policy‐making set out in the policy cycle model. This article argues that extending and modifying…
A public policy approach to understanding the nature and causes of foreign policy failure
All governments are vulnerable to policy failure but our understanding of the nature and causes of policy failure is highly underdeveloped. This contribution, written from a public policy perspective, sets out a framework for understanding these issues as applied to foreign policy. In doing so, it seeks a cross-disciplinary fertilization of thinking that uses the messy and contested reality of policy failure as fundamentally a key – rather than a…
Weaving the Fabric of Public Policies
For close to three decades multiple frameworks of policy-making have served as competitive characterizations of policy processes. All claim to provide accounts that capture diverse factors such as changing governance norms, actors and ideas which drive programme interventions and policy outputs. Paradoxically, the resilience of different models such as the policy cycle framework and the multiple streams framework has been accompanied by numerous …
Who saw it coming? The UK’s great financial crisis
Who foresaw the UK banking crisis? This paper addresses this issue through detailed empirical work on the content of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s speeches, Bank of EnglandFinancial Stability Reports, Financial Service Authority reports and speeches by Bank of England officials, editorials in theTimesandFinancial Times, bank annual reports and financial statements, credit rating reports, share price movements, Parliamentary questions, Treasur…
Streams and stages
Use of metaphors is a staple feature of how we understand policy processes – none more so than the use of ‘policy stages’/'cycles’ and ‘multiple streams’. Yet even allowing for the necessary parsimony of metaphors, the former is often criticised for its lack of ‘real world’ engagement with agency, power, ideology, turbulence and complexity, while the latter focuses only on agenda‐setting but at times has been utilised, with limited results, to un…
What is policy failure? A primer to help navigate the maze
The discipline of public policy has struggled to come to terms with how we may conceive of ‘policy failure’. It tends to assume either that failure is self-evident or that it can be assessed by means of examining the gap between government goals and outcomes. Often, there are multiple caveats that seem too difficult to address – particularly the role of perceptions, which in turn are often dependent on whether or not the policy is supported. This…
Why didn't they See it Coming? Warning Signs, Acceptable Risks and the Global Financial Crisis
In the immediate aftermath of a crisis, one of the most damning and penetrating questions asked of political leaders and senior state officials by the media, opposition parties and other actors is: ‘why didn't they see it coming?’ The question is often rhetorical, the implication being that warning signs were clear and should have been acted upon. In this article we identify the assumptions underpinning the ‘why didn't they see it coming?’ narrat…
Risk and Crisis Management in the Public Sector
A particular feature of modern, post-industrial societies is their growing awareness of risk and crisis management. This book’s main theme is therefore the context, concepts and practice of risk and crisis management in the public sector in Western, notably European, and Asia Pacific countries. Relating to extraordinary phenomena, the term ‘risk and crisis management’, covers such events and incidents as: natural catastrophes (earthquakes, hurric…
Gender, Politics, Institutions
Great Policy Successes
Great Policy Successes: Or, a Tale About Why It's Amazing That Governments Get So Little Credit for Their Many Everyday and Extraordinary Achievements as Told by Sympathetic Observers Who Seek to Create Space for a Less Relentlessly Negative View of Our Pivotal Public Institutions." Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice, 23(3), pp. 389–390
Crisis exploitation
When societies are confronted with major, disruptive emergencies, the fate of politicians and public policies hangs in the balance. Both government actors and their critics will try to escape blame for their occurrence, consolidate/strengthen their political capital, and advance/defend the policies they stand for. Crises thus generate framing contests to interpret events, their causes, and the responsibilities and lessons involved in ways that su…
Policy Success, Policy Failure and Grey Areas In-Between
Policy protagonists are keen to claim that policy is successful while opponents are more likely to frame policies as failures. The reality is that policy outcomes are often somewhere in between these extremes. An added difficulty is that policy has multiple dimensions, often succeeding in some respects but not in others, according to facts and their interpretation. This paper sets out a framework designed to capture the bundles of outcomes that i…
Covid-19 and the policy sciences
Towards a Framework for Establishing Policy Success
Claims that a particular policy has been a ‘success’ are commonplace in political life. However, a few of these claims are justified in any systematic way. This article seeks to remedy this omission by offering a heuristic which practitioners and academics can utilize to approach the question of whether a policy is, or was, successful. It builds initially on two sets of literature: Boyne's work on public sector improvement; and the work of Bovens…
Streams and stages
Use of metaphors is a staple feature of how we understand policy processes – none more so than the use of ‘policy stages’/'cycles’ and ‘multiple streams’. Yet even allowing for the necessary parsimony of metaphors, the former is often criticised for its lack of ‘real world’ engagement with agency, power, ideology, turbulence and complexity, while the latter focuses only on agenda‐setting but at times has been utilised, with limited results, to un…
Leadership Style, Crisis Response and Blame Management
Crisis management research has largely ignored one of the most pressing challenges political leaders are confronted with in the wake of a large-scale extreme event: how to cope with what is commonly called the blame game. In this article, we provide a heuristic to help understand political leader responses to blame in the aftermath of crises, emphasizing the crucial role of their leadership style on the political management of Inquiries. After in…
Inaction and public policy
In recent decades, the policy sciences have struggled to come to terms with the significance of inaction in public policy. Inaction refers to instances when policymakers ‘do nothing’ about societal issues. This article aims to put the study of inaction on a new footing. It presents a five-part typology of forms of inaction before focusing on detail on core drivers of inaction found at four policy-making loci: individuals (coping behaviour), publi…
A public policy approach to understanding the nature and causes of foreign policy failure
All governments are vulnerable to policy failure but our understanding of the nature and causes of policy failure is highly underdeveloped. This contribution, written from a public policy perspective, sets out a framework for understanding these issues as applied to foreign policy. In doing so, it seeks a cross-disciplinary fertilization of thinking that uses the messy and contested reality of policy failure as fundamentally a key – rather than a…
What is policy failure? A primer to help navigate the maze
The discipline of public policy has struggled to come to terms with how we may conceive of ‘policy failure’. It tends to assume either that failure is self-evident or that it can be assessed by means of examining the gap between government goals and outcomes. Often, there are multiple caveats that seem too difficult to address – particularly the role of perceptions, which in turn are often dependent on whether or not the policy is supported. This…
Moving Policy Theory Forward
The stages/policy cycle, multiple streams, and Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) approaches to understanding policy processes, all have analytical value although also attracting substantive criticism. An obvious direction for research is to determine whether the multiple streams framework and the ACF can be refined and applied to other dimensions of policy‐making set out in the policy cycle model. This article argues that extending and modifying…
The use of placebo policies to escape from policy traps
This article provides a roadmap to help analysts approach the under-researched phenomena of policy-making driven to some extent by an attempt to show that governments and broader governing systems have a policy in place to manage tough policy issues, rather than addressing deeper causal factors of the problem. The metaphor of placebo policies is used to explore these issues, supported by a novel secondary metaphor of a 'policy trap' (expectations…
Rethinking wicked problems as political problems and policy problems
Study of the 'politics' of wicked problems has tended to be ad hoc, scattered across multiple disciplines. This article seeks to address this gap in our understanding. As well as the traditional policy challenges of wicked issues, elites also have to consider the impact on political reputations, control of agendas and the promotion of particular ideological/governance trajectories. In this context, and focusing on wicked issues as presenting both…
Why didn't they See it Coming? Warning Signs, Acceptable Risks and the Global Financial Crisis
In the immediate aftermath of a crisis, one of the most damning and penetrating questions asked of political leaders and senior state officials by the media, opposition parties and other actors is: ‘why didn't they see it coming?’ The question is often rhetorical, the implication being that warning signs were clear and should have been acted upon. In this article we identify the assumptions underpinning the ‘why didn't they see it coming?’ narrat…
Weaving the Fabric of Public Policies
For close to three decades multiple frameworks of policy-making have served as competitive characterizations of policy processes. All claim to provide accounts that capture diverse factors such as changing governance norms, actors and ideas which drive programme interventions and policy outputs. Paradoxically, the resilience of different models such as the policy cycle framework and the multiple streams framework has been accompanied by numerous …
Hidden agendas
Allegations of hidden policy agendas are a perennial feature of public policy-making, but there are no works in existence dealing directly and systematically with this crucial phenomenon. This article seeks to address this gap with a novel heuristic allowing analysts to approach the topic of hidden agendas. It addresses issues of methodology: Who hides? What is hidden? Who do they hide it from? Tools/techniques used to hide. Consequences of hidde…
Success? Failure? Something in-between? A framework for evaluating crisis management
Crisis management evaluators and commentators, routinely attach labels of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ to crisis management initiatives. Yet there is a near absence of detailed criteria against which outcomes can be assessed. This article goes some way to redressing this paucity of reflection. The article presents an innovative framework to help analysts approach and evaluate the issue of what constitutes success (and failure) in crisis management ini…
Overview
Journal Article Overview: Crisis Management, Influences, Responses and Evaluation Get access Allan McConnell Allan McConnell Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Parliamentary Affairs, Volume 56, Issue 3, 1 July 2003, Pages 363–409, https://doi.org/10.1093/parlij/gsg096 Published: 01 July 2003
Explanations for the Brexit policy fiasco
The inability of the Conservative Government led by Prime Minister Theresa May to deliver a Brexit deal by 29 March 2019 was a policy fiasco, condemned widely by Remainers and Leavers alike. The entire process was a unique combination of chaos, day-by-day unravelling of new proposals and gridlock. This article examines three main explanations for the fiasco that are prevalent in contemporary political discourse. Analysis is underpinned by concept…
Policy success for whom? A framework for analysis
Towards a Framework for Establishing Policy Success
A response to Bovens comment on Marsh and McConnell: Towards a framework for establishing policy success
Foot-and-Mouth 2001
Journal Article Foot‐and‐Mouth 2001: The Politics of Crisis Management Get access Allan McConnell, Allan McConnell Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Alastair Stark Alastair Stark Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Parliamentary Affairs, Volume 55, Issue 4, 1 October 2002, Pages 664–681, https://doi.org/10.1093/parlij/55.4.664 Published: 01 October 2002
Understanding policy responses to Covid-19
Responses to COVID-19 across the globe are immensely varied and often perplexing. Policy levers, from mask wearing and social distancing to lockdowns and school closures, have been adopted and avoided with equal conviction by decisions makers who believe their measures are appropriate. In some contexts, the global pandemic has been treated with due seriousness by governments and political leaders while in others it has been downplayed to such an …
Two routes to precarious success
Australia and New Zealand are routinely presented as sharing more in common than the federal and unitary systems separating them. As two modernising Antipodean settler societies, their governing trajectories have embraced waves of public administration/management reform. Shared pathways seem matched by their relative, although precarious and fragile, early successes in the crisis challenges of COVID-19. This article contextualises and examines on…
Policy Fiascos, Blame Management and AWB Limited
In 1999, the Australian government privatised the statutory Australian Wheat Board and created AWB Limited, transferring the Board's assets and its export monopoly to a grower-controlled company. In 2000, allegations surfaced that AWB Limited had made payments to Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime in order to secure lucrative wheat exports worth $500 million per annum. Such actions violated the terms of the United Nations' Oil-for-Food Programme and b…
Dramaturgy and crisis management
Dramaturgical perspectives have been used successfully in the past by crisis management researchers. However, previous contributions have been limited because they have been actor‐centered, which has meant that they have tended to ignore the critical role that an audience can play in the drama of a crisis. This article therefore presents a “third act” in which dramaturgical perspectives are used to deliver an actor‐and‐audience centered analysis …
The birth of the poll tax
A Committee Again
The impending revival of the House of Commons Scottish Affairs Select Committee in the summer of 1992 brought a mixed reaction from politicians and political commentators. The opposition parties in Scotland welcomed the resurrection of this organ of parliamentary scrutiny while stressing that it was no substitute for broad constitutional reform in Scotland. The Conservatives generally expressed satisfaction that the Scottish Office was to be plac…
Local Government and the NHS
The aim of this paper is to compare and contrast accountability within local government and the NHS in the UK. There are it seems a plethora of analyses which deal individually with each of these components of decentralised government, but few purport to compare and contrast the concept of account ability as it applies to both. A key theme of the analysis is that in spite of a number of differences between regimes of accountability in local gover…
The Select Committee On Scottish Affairs
The recurring crisis of local taxation in post‐war Britain
This article outlines and attempts to explain the recurring ‘crisis’ of local taxation in post‐war Britain. It provides an analytical framework by arguing that local taxation is an issue on which the centre is especially vulnerable and that particular crisis ‘agents’ may trigger a crisis. It then applies this to the crisis of averting a crisis in the 1952–57 period; solving the crisis of rates unpopularity in the 1963–66 period; the handling of t…
Local Taxation, Policy Formation and Policy Change
Foot-and-Mouth 2001
Journal Article Foot‐and‐Mouth 2001: The Politics of Crisis Management Get access Allan McConnell, Allan McConnell Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Alastair Stark Alastair Stark Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Parliamentary Affairs, Volume 55, Issue 4, 1 October 2002, Pages 664–681, https://doi.org/10.1093/parlij/55.4.664 Published: 01 October 2002
Bureaucratic Failure and the UK's Lack of Preparedness for Foot and Mouth Disease
This article explores the UK's lack of preparedness for Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) and the consequences for the 2001 outbreak. First, it utilises literature on crisis management and policy failure in order explore the problems caused by, and explanations for, lack of crisis preparedness. Second, it examines in detail a series of overlapping bureaucratic failures, particularly on the part of the Ministry for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF…
Success and Failure in Public Governance
Overview
Journal Article Overview: Crisis Management, Influences, Responses and Evaluation Get access Allan McConnell Allan McConnell Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Parliamentary Affairs, Volume 56, Issue 3, 1 July 2003, Pages 363–409, https://doi.org/10.1093/parlij/gsg096 Published: 01 July 2003
Mission Impossible? Planning and Preparing for Crisis1
Crisis management logic suggests that planning and preparing for crisis should be a vital part of institutional and policy toolkits. This paper explores the difficulties in translating this ideal into practice. It focuses on four key difficulties. First, crises and disasters are low probability events but they place large demands on resources and have to compete against front-line service provision. Second, contingency planning requires ordering …
Central-local government relations in Scotland
For many years, advocates of a Scottish Parliament hoped that its eventual arrival would mark a new phase in local government: an increase in local autonomy and a redressing of the creeping centralization of the Conservative years. This article addresses the question: to what extent, if any, has there been a shift in the balance of power between centre and local government since the advent of a Scottish Parliament in 1999? It examines the pre- an…
Policy responses to crisis
English This article seeks to examine the UK government's policy responses to the 2002–04 firefighters’ dispute, a prolonged crisis which necessitated the activation of the central government's contingency planning procedures for a public safety emergency. The framework for analysis draws on a set of key criteria against which governmental and organisational policy responses to crises can be categorised: agenda management, centralisation of polic…
Preparing for Critical Infrastructure Breakdowns
Modern societies are widely considered to harbour an increased propensity for breakdowns of their critical infrastructure (CI) systems. While such breakdowns have proven rather rare, Hurricane Katrina has demonstrated the catastrophic consequences of such breakdowns. This article explores how public authorities can effectively prepare to cope with these rare events. Drawing from the literature on crisis and disaster management, we examine the str…
Governing after crisis
In all societies, life as usual is punctuated from time to time by critical episodes marked by a sense of threat and uncertainty that shatters people's understanding of the world around them. We refer to these episodes in terms of crisis. Crises are triggered in a variety of ways; for example, by natural forces (earthquakes, hurricanes, torrential rains, ice storms, epidemics and the like) or by the deliberate acts of ‘others’ (‘enemies’) inside …
Governing after Crisis
The constant threat of crises such as disasters, riots and terrorist attacks poses a frightening challenge to Western societies and governments. While the causes and dynamics of these events have been widely studied, we know little about what happens following their containment and the restoration of stability. This volume explores 'post-crisis politics,' examining how crises give birth to longer term dynamic processes of accountability and learn…
Ripples Not Waves
The aim of this article is to understand why, in the aftermath of the 1998 Sydney water contamination crisis, policy and institutional reform was comparatively minor—despite intense scrutiny and criticism of the framework of water policy in New South Wales (NSW). The article should be of serious interest to scholars interested in crisis and policy change, rather than simply those with a particular interest in water policy in Australia. It frames …
Policy Fiascos, Blame Management and AWB Limited
In 1999, the Australian government privatised the statutory Australian Wheat Board and created AWB Limited, transferring the Board's assets and its export monopoly to a grower-controlled company. In 2000, allegations surfaced that AWB Limited had made payments to Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime in order to secure lucrative wheat exports worth $500 million per annum. Such actions violated the terms of the United Nations' Oil-for-Food Programme and b…
Remote crisis management
On 12 July 2006, Hezbollah's kidnapping of two young Israeli soldiers was the catalyst for a sudden escalation of the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. Lebanon was host to more citizens and permanent residents from Australia than any other country in the world. This article examines the monumental challenge faced by the Australian authorities in rescuing and repatriating its citizens who were caught up in the conflict. It does so through the…
Do crises help remedy regulatory failure? A comparative study of the Walkerton water and Jerusalem banquet hall disasters
This study explores whether and how policy changes in the aftermath of a crisis. The authors ask why pre‐existing regulatory regimes that are identified as contributory factors to “failure” are not necessarily reformed in the wake of a crisis. The investigation adds to the literature that addresses the classic tension between reformism and conservatism in post‐crisis periods. Regulatory failure is identified as being largely responsible for two c…
Crisis exploitation
When societies are confronted with major, disruptive emergencies, the fate of politicians and public policies hangs in the balance. Both government actors and their critics will try to escape blame for their occurrence, consolidate/strengthen their political capital, and advance/defend the policies they stand for. Crises thus generate framing contests to interpret events, their causes, and the responsibilities and lessons involved in ways that su…
Understanding Policy Success
Towards a Framework for Establishing Policy Success
A response to Bovens comment on Marsh and McConnell: Towards a framework for establishing policy success
Leadership Style, Crisis Response and Blame Management
Crisis management research has largely ignored one of the most pressing challenges political leaders are confronted with in the wake of a large-scale extreme event: how to cope with what is commonly called the blame game. In this article, we provide a heuristic to help understand political leader responses to blame in the aftermath of crises, emphasizing the crucial role of their leadership style on the political management of Inquiries. After in…
Towards a Framework for Establishing Policy Success
Claims that a particular policy has been a ‘success’ are commonplace in political life. However, a few of these claims are justified in any systematic way. This article seeks to remedy this omission by offering a heuristic which practitioners and academics can utilize to approach the question of whether a policy is, or was, successful. It builds initially on two sets of literature: Boyne's work on public sector improvement; and the work of Bovens…
Political science (50 obras) · Law (40 obras) · Economics (34 obras) · Law (33 obras) · Politics (31 obras) · Public Administration (28 obras) · Sociology (26 obras) · Public Administration (24 obras) · Public Policy and Administration Research (20 obras) · Disaster Management and Resilience (18 obras)